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Democratic Infrastructure

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Democratic infrastructure is not a single agreed concept the way sortition or participatory budgeting are — it's a phrase more than one person has reached for independently, for related but distinct ideas. Checked directly against each source below: neither cites or builds on the other. That's worth stating plainly rather than picking one sense and presenting it as the definition, which is why this page is structured as a dictionary entry — each sense attributed separately — rather than DOD's usual single-topic concept page.

Sense 1 — civic-capacity infrastructure

Hollie Russon Gilman and K. Sabeel Rahman coined this sense across three venues between 2018 and 2019 — a Stanford Social Innovation Review article, a New America theoretical framework, and a joint New America/Demos report — all making the same underlying argument:

"To address these issues, civil society organization and local governments should build more long-term and durable democratic infrastructure, with the aim of empowering constituencies to participate in meaningful and concrete ways, overcoming division within our societies, and addressing a general distrust of government by enhancing accountability."1

The New America framework grounds this in sociologist Charles Tilly's definition of democracy as depending on a wider set of social, economic, and political institutions — not just elections — that make possible "broad, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultation" between the state and the public.2 In this sense, democratic infrastructure is the civic capacity — media, civil society, party systems — that lets citizens organise and make political claims between elections, not just during them.

Sense 2 — deliberation-capacity infrastructure

Democratic Society (trading as Demsoc), a UK-based organisation, published its own definition in December 2022 via its former parent body FDSD, with no reference to Gilman, Rahman, New America, or Demos anywhere in the piece:

"We define Democratic Infrastructure as: persistent, generally available sets of elements that enable the continuous development, reinforcement and reimagination of democracy in a defined context."3

The emphasis here is different from Sense 1: not civic capacity broadly, but specifically the elements — "a contextualised plan for democracy, capabilities, networks, and governance systems" — that let a deliberative or participatory process compound over time instead of resetting to zero after each one-off assembly or consultation.

A third sighting, and why it isn't listed as a sense

While researching this page, DOD found a third, different usage: Folio Collective's own introduction for a September 2026 event described Better Politics Foundation's Better Politics Index as measuring "the support and development of political leaders as key democratic infrastructure" — a leadership-support sense, distinct from both senses above. That exact sentence was checked against the live page while drafting this entry, and had been edited out by the time this page was finished a few hours later — Folio rewrote the bio copy it came from, and the "democratic infrastructure" framing didn't survive the rewrite. Better Politics Foundation's own site doesn't use the phrase anywhere DOD has found. Rather than cite a sentence already known to no longer be live — which this site's sourcing rules don't allow — it's noted here as a data point for the page's actual thesis: even a single characterization, from a single source, on a single day, didn't hold still long enough to source properly. That's a smaller-scale version of the same convergent-and-divergent coining this page documents.

Why list these separately rather than merge them

Merging the two sourced senses into one definition would misrepresent both — they don't agree on what the infrastructure actually consists of (civic capacity vs. deliberation capacity), and there's no evidence either author was aware of the other's usage. Treating this as a case of convergent coinage — different people independently reaching for the same evocative phrase for related-but-different ideas — is the more honest read than treating it as one field-wide term with minor variations. If another source turns up making yet another argument under this name — and holds still long enough to cite — add it as a new sense rather than forcing a fit into one of the two above.

Further reading

See also

  1. "To address these issues, civil society organization and local governments should build more long-term and durable democratic infrastructure, with the aim of empowering constituencies to participate in meaningful and concrete ways, overcoming division within our societies, and addressing a general distrust of government by enhancing accountability." Hollie Russon Gilman, K. Sabeel Rahman & Elena Souris, "Building Democratic Infrastructure" ✓ Verified, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 7 March 2018. ↩

  2. "Democracy, as Tilly notes, is best understood not as a specific institutional form (of, say, elections or party systems or the separation of powers), but rather by a wider set of social, economic, and political institutions that make possible “broad, equal, protected, and mutually binding consultation” between state actors and the public." "I. Democratic Infrastructure: A Theoretical Framework" ✓ Verified, New America, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩

  3. "We define Democratic Infrastructure as: persistent, generally available sets of elements that enable the continuous development, reinforcement and reimagination of democracy in a defined context." "Democratic infrastructure: turning one-off deliberations into resilient democracies" ✓ Verified, Democratic Society / FDSD, 12 December 2022. ↩